D&D 4E Sales Figures Debate

[DSMatticus]

I just want to say I told you so. I mean, it's not like it wasn't already obvious, but admit it - you all wish you'd put him on ignore when I did instead of getting into... whatever this is. I don't think you can call it an argument, for the same reason you can't call a man headbutting a brick wall a fight - it's not so much a conflict as a bad decision.

[TarkisFlux]

My point is that no one here has enough so saying that "4e failed" is at best an outright lie. It MIGHT be right, but you do not know that and can not know that (well if you worked for Wotc and had access to their info you could, but that seams doubtful).

For someone so disillusioned with inference, you seem to have no problem stepping in it every time you try to make a point.

Lie. Defn: a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth.

You do not have sufficient data to prove intent. The lying complaint MIGHT be right, but you do not know that and can not know that (well, if you were them and had access to their mental state you could, but that seams [sic] doubtful). The best you can claim, by your own standards of proof, is that people are simply wrong.

[MGuy]

I just want to say I told you so. I mean, it's not like it wasn't already obvious, but admit it - you all wish you'd put him on ignore when I did instead of getting into... whatever this is. I don't think you can call it an argument, for the same reason you can't call a man headbutting a brick wall a fight - it's not so much a conflict as a bad decision.

I actually find it mildly amusing. I honestly thought all the 4E fans all had to face facts when Essentials was pushed out the door.

[erik]

I just want to say I told you so. I mean, it's not like it wasn't already obvious, but admit it - you all wish you'd put him on ignore when I did instead of getting into... whatever this is. I don't think you can call it an argument, for the same reason you can't call a man headbutting a brick wall a fight - it's not so much a conflict as a bad decision.

I'm happy for taking 2 days longer to ignore him than you, you early adopter. It let this topic build up enough steam to become a decent repository for all the evidence that 4e failed.

There's no point in not just ignoring him since he refuses to engage, except for those people who enjoy watching someone headbutt a wall. Admit it, you'd watch a vine of a moron trying to headbutt a wall. Perhaps people can get their fix there.

[ishy]

We also know that the second printing of the 4e stuff was done before the game was even released due to Sell-in sales, and that the initial 4e print run was 50% higher than the initial 3.5 print run. This is a fact and was stated by WotC. That information points out that the print runs for 4e were not the largest possible, so we know that they didn't print even 600,000 books, which makes their numbers even worse. The fact that their initial print run was so small that they had to print a second one before the game even shipped points to very low print runs.

Not really. Needing a second print run is a marketing gimmick.

They [WotC] also know roughly how many units the buyers at the big chain bookstores are going to take long before the books are printed. The solicitation cycles for the bookstores are longer than the production cycles which means Wizards often has the luxury of "printing to order". When I left the company, book store sales were about 50% of the total volume.

[violence in the media]

I want to know why this guy is so hung up on the DDI data? What possible numbers are large enough for DDI to put forth that would demonstrate that [whine] 4e was totally a big success, guys, [/whine] but that are still small enough that the behavior of WotC is still rational or, at least, understandable?

I'm not convinced that those numbers are even possible, which makes the presence or absence of DDI data irrelevant.

Besides, what would DDI data even reasonably show? Beyond that a bunch of disappointed fanboys forgot to cancel their overpriced monthly subscription?

[Leress]

What is most annoying is that Pike still hasn't shown the amazon best seller data. I would like to see it.

Also I've been reading through Hasbro's SEC fillings, Conference call notes, and other Reports and I haven't seen any mention of DnD except when they talk about getting some rights back from EA (I think?). I still some more looking into those.

[virgil]

I said that we do not have enough data to know how popular 4e was, and we do not. we do not have DDI sales so we can not know how much money it made, we do not have the pathfinder data we would need to compare them.

We do not have the data for whether 4E was less popular than Harry Potter or WoW?

Do the court records are not reliable data points for knowing that ALL of 4E's books totaled less that one million over the span of its first year? First-hand account from Ryan D, a marketing guy with direct access to WotC's records, is not trustworthy when he says the 3E PHB sold 300k books in the first 30 days, and they continued to make more print runs for years after?

[Echoes]

What propaganda are you talking about?

I should have been more clear. Please provide a link to your data.

Anything Wotc or anyone who works for them says that has not been verified by a trusted third party is propaganda. Same with any other company unless they are admitting to something so heinous that nothing could be worse for them then what they said.

So your argument is that all of WotC's statements in court attesting to the tiny amounts of 4E product they sold, the fact that they fired the Line Director of 4E every year, and the fact that WotC doesn't mention 4E ever when talking about past successes is propaganda. What the flying monkey fuck? Do you not understand the purpose of propaganda? You don't make propaganda to make yourself look like total fuckups. That doesn't even make fucking sense.

Newsflash moron: mismanaging the single largest name in an entire industry so badly that someone's bullshit knock-off of your last product overtakes your shiny new product in market share is a fucking travesty. There's your "heinous thing that nothing could be worse for them to do". WotC is a company that makes games. They own the most recognizable, most brandable, most sellable name in the entire fucking tabletop games industry, and they drove it into the fucking ground so badly that they fired the dude in charge every fucking year for the entire duration of the edition, whereupon they cancelled everything in the pipeline and opted to print nothing for two fucking years over printing any of the shit that they had planned.

For fuck's sake, if you want to tell someone that you play TTRPGs, you don't say that, you say you play D&D because people know what D&D is: people sitting around a table, rolling dice and being nerdy. They may have never played D&D. They may have never even seen a D&D rulebook, character sheet, or literally anything that was actually D&D at all, but if you tell them that you play D&D they will picture a bunch of people (ok, guys) sitting around a table rolling dice without you having to describe or explain anything else at all. D&D is pop culture, and it is literally the only fucking TTRPG that is. And sure, while D&D is a drop in the bucket compared to M:tG (which is obviously where the people with actual game design chops at WotC work), money is money and the TTRPG community is so bullshit small and D&D was (at that point) so fucking huge that to fail to capitalize on what was essentially a monopoly is a business catastrophe.

I do not have enough data to know, for the fifth time. My point is that no one here has enough so saying that "4e failed" is at best an outright lie. It MIGHT be right, but you do not know that and can not know that (well if you worked for Wotc and had access to their info you could, but that seams doubtful).

Just because you are incapable of processing data that is not spoon-fed to you doesn't mean other people can't put two and two together and get fucking four. Get your head out of Mike Mearl's ass and think about what you are saying. Your argument is seriously that it is more likely that WotC covered 4E's resounding success by firing the Line Director every fucking year and canning the entire edition (printing nothing for years over printing more shovelware) than it is that 4E tanked so hard that someone's bullshit 3.5 houserules could become the best-selling RPG on the market?

[fbmf]

as I said before I THINK it succeeded, the limited data I have seen shows this.

Where is this data?

the amazon best seller list, anecdotal evidence enough for me to think it did, but no more.

Uhm...wait a minute...you said earlier

I am sorry you are right, by my own logic amazon would not be enough data, I have a feeling it would be a better indicator then online gaming but that is all it is.

To be clear, you have admitted that you are not working with any data (that you consider valid) as to how successful 4E was. DSM, Frank, Kaelik, et al have brought forth court docs that you accept as solid, if incomplete, data.

So you have "how you feel" and/or "what you like to believe".
So since you've called folks here liars for having (by your standards) an incomplete data set, I have to ask...when you said you have "limited data", that was you lying to us, right?

Game On,
fbmf

[LR]

At this point, we've really exhausted all of the funny noises we can get out of Pike and we should probably discuss why they are completely wrong, and how that wrongness can be described as an elegant fractal of unrelenting horseshit. With that in mind, I'd like to explain the two apparent pillars of Pike's thesis, "WotC totally didn't fuck up with 4e, you guys!" The first being that we totally don't know how 4e did because WotC is the only entity who we could ever trust. That is of course interesting because Pike doesn't believe it. If they were such a fanboy that they actually believed that, then they would take the numbers (hundreds of thousands!) that WotC put out as fucking gospel, but they don't, demanding more numbers to coalesce from WotC's marketing department. They have to, because the alternative (accepting that the Super Honest Wizards would not commit perjury) is unthinkable to them. There's no point in arguing with them there. Only they can divine WotC's secret thoughts and only they can tell us when we should take WotC at their word. Luckily, Pike isn't recognized by anyone as the Infallible D&D Pope (that's Skip), and the actual numbers released by WotC show that it sold at least an order of magnitude worse than 3e and that online sales were worse than bullshit indie games that nobody cares about (apologies to Frank and his bullshit indies).

The second is that DDI totally redeemed the brand and you can never know how well that did! Except of course that we fucking can, because the idea that anybody would buy a DDI subscription without owning at least the core books is plainly ridiculous. Whatever DDI sales were, they were necessarily worse than the sales of the dead tree version, because 4e did not have an actual SRD, and you could not play the game without owning a physical copy (online sales, as have already been shown, are a statistical anomaly rather than anything that actually happened). So unless Pike is saying that 4e piracy was so bizarre and rampant that people were willing to pay a DDI sub for their illegal copy of the game, the 'DDI saved the Brand!' argument can be discounted out of hand. In fact, I only took the time to explain it because Pike is rather slow and would demand to have their hand held anyway. One wonders if they can even make it out of the bathroom without demanding an affidavit about how many people really use toilets anyway.

And that's really it for Pike. Doublespeak about how WotC is so trustworthy and honest that they are willing to perjure themselves, and a smokescreen about people willing to buy DDI despite not owning a copy of the game. Once you've exhausted those lines of arguments, there's nothing left but solipsism about how we can't really know anything about sales data, man! Assuming that they really believe that it's unknowable, why are they here at all?

[RedstoneOrc]

. Luckily, Pike isn't recognized by anyone as the Infallible D&D Pope (that's Skip), and the actual numbers released by WotC show that it sold at least an order of magnitude worse than 3e and that online sales were worse than bullshit indie games that nobody cares about (apologies to Frank and his bullshit indies).

Dude I bought his bullshit indies, unlike that bullshit (phone autotexted that to Hillary) 4E. I THINK you owe me an apology, but I do not know if you owe me one /sarcasm.

[Stubbazubba]

"more likely" is not good enough, you might as well flip a coin.

Your entire standard of truth here is wrong, for 2 reasons:

1) "More likely than not" is by definition not a coin flip, so you're either a moron who didn't realize the two things he equated were defined by their dissimilarity, or you're just trying to slip some misinformation into this conversation, hoping no one will catch your dishonesty. I'm partial to the former interpretation, but I guess I can't prove it unless I know you personally (wait that wouldn't work because you could be using my long familiarity with you to know just how to deceive me!), do a polygraph (no, wait, those aren't infallible, either), am the all-knowing God. Which I might be. You can't prove otherwise.

2) "More likely than not" absolutely is good enough. It's actually the legal standard for non-criminal fact-finding. When folks go to court for money, the jury (or judge) only has to decide which side's evidence is more likely than not, which side's evidence pushes the odds "just past equipoise," or just gets to 50.1% likely. That is how we make decisions that award hundreds of millions of dollars in damages or undo any and all contracts. Even under the criminal standard "beyond reasonable doubt," the doubt has to be reasonable. When the evidence is stacked up like this against an admitted complete lack of any conflicting evidence, there's a very good argument that there is no reasonable doubt. In fact, when the evidence is so lopsided, the judge could even give a directed verdict and stop wasting the jury's time, because your only argument comes down to "I think it was successful, and while there's nothing that actually says it was, it's totally possible that the multiple sources of evidence we do have of what people are playing are totally skewed away from 4e for some unexplained reason, and that WotC employees are in a grand conspiracy to hide 4e's success in any and all public fora (including under oath and penalty of perjury)! And you can't prove that's not the case, therefore this is at the very least a draw!"



It is not a draw. We have met any standard that mortal men have ever needed to make any determination, including far more serious and long-lasting ones than this. People are sentenced to death on this much evidence or less.

It's fine for you to like 4e. People here do, no one really cares. It actually had a lot of good ideas behind a lot of what it did. We can still like things, still enjoy them, and recognize that they just don't do it for most people, or that we enjoy them despite their flaws. There's no shame in that. In fact, it's a sign of maturity, and an expression of individualism: you don't need the whole world to tell you what you're doing is a good thing, you have the confidence in your own experience to decide what works best for you. That's generally a good place to be.

So here's your chance: just accept that it looks like 4e wasn't the success WotC was hoping for. Whether or not 4e was a success isn't a reflection on you or your tastes, it doesn't make your enjoyment of it any less legitimate. Other people just felt differently, for whatever reason. And that has nothing to do with you.

So here's the olive branch: admit that it looks like 4e wasn't a success, and everyone can and probably will forget this thread ever happened. We can talk about more interesting things like how bad 5e will turn out to do. If you refuse to accept that olive branch, then frankly everyone should just put you on Ignore, and I certainly will.

[name_here]

I want to know why this guy is so hung up on the DDI data? What possible numbers are large enough for DDI to put forth that would demonstrate that [whine] 4e was totally a big success, guys, [/whine] but that are still small enough that the behavior of WotC is still rational or, at least, understandable?

He may be porting that line of argument over from video game sales figure arguments, which usually have data sources that do not include digital distribution. It's relevant there because it is reasonable to expect that digital sales do not consistently correlate to physical sales and therefore a game may have fewer physical sales and more total sales than another. For instance, a game that requires Steam or Origin most likely has a higher percentage of digital sales than a game which does not.

Of course, in this case people who got DDI subscriptions will mostly be a subset of people who bought books.

[deaddmwalking]

The most amusing part to me is that Captain Pike only accepts comparisons to games published during the run of 4e. Because the release of 4e drove out 'buyers' from the market, 4e only had to sell ~10% of the prior market to have 100% market share - and he defines that as success.

Releasing a product so universally panned that people stop buying the product completely is sort of the opposite of that.

Anecdotally, I still play RPGs, but I haven't bought anything 'new' since halfway through 'Second Darkness'. Pike thinks that me choosing to keep playing with derived 3.x materials proves the success of 4th edition .

Crazy.

[CaptPike]

"more likely" is not good enough, you might as well flip a coin.

Your entire standard of truth here is wrong, for 2 reasons:

1) "More likely than not" is by definition not a coin flip, so you're either a moron who didn't realize the two things he equated were defined by their dissimilarity, or you're just trying to slip some misinformation into this conversation, hoping no one will catch your dishonesty. I'm partial to the former interpretation, but I guess I can't prove it unless I know you personally (wait that wouldn't work because you could be using my long familiarity with you to know just how to deceive me!), do a polygraph (no, wait, those aren't infallible, either), am the all-knowing God. Which I might be. You can't prove otherwise.

2) "More likely than not" absolutely is good enough. It's actually the legal standard for non-criminal fact-finding. When folks go to court for money, the jury (or judge) only has to decide which side's evidence is more likely than not, which side's evidence pushes the odds "just past equipoise," or just gets to 50.1% likely. That is how we make decisions that award hundreds of millions of dollars in damages or undo any and all contracts. Even under the criminal standard "beyond reasonable doubt," the doubt has to be reasonable. When the evidence is stacked up like this against an admitted complete lack of any conflicting evidence, there's a very good argument that there is no reasonable doubt. In fact, when the evidence is so lopsided, the judge could even give a directed verdict and stop wasting the jury's time, because your only argument comes down to "I think it was successful, and while there's nothing that actually says it was, it's totally possible that the multiple sources of evidence we do have of what people are playing are totally skewed away from 4e for some unexplained reason, and that WotC employees are in a grand conspiracy to hide 4e's success in any and all public fora (including under oath and penalty of perjury)! And you can't prove that's not the case, therefore this is at the very least a draw!"



It is not a draw. We have met any standard that mortal men have ever needed to make any determination, including far more serious and long-lasting ones than this. People are sentenced to death on this much evidence or less.

It's fine for you to like 4e. People here do, no one really cares. It actually had a lot of good ideas behind a lot of what it did. We can still like things, still enjoy them, and recognize that they just don't do it for most people, or that we enjoy them despite their flaws. There's no shame in that. In fact, it's a sign of maturity, and an expression of individualism: you don't need the whole world to tell you what you're doing is a good thing, you have the confidence in your own experience to decide what works best for you. That's generally a good place to be.

So here's your chance: just accept that it looks like 4e wasn't the success WotC was hoping for. Whether or not 4e was a success isn't a reflection on you or your tastes, it doesn't make your enjoyment of it any less legitimate. Other people just felt differently, for whatever reason. And that has nothing to do with you.

So here's the olive branch: admit that it looks like 4e wasn't a success, and everyone can and probably will forget this thread ever happened. We can talk about more interesting things like how bad 5e will turn out to do. If you refuse to accept that olive branch, then frankly everyone should just put you on Ignore, and I certainly will.

using only the incomplete and bias information we have yes it MIGHT be that 4e failed. It is very possible, but 60% or so is not good enough for me personally.

My point is that no one here has enough so saying that "4e failed" is at best an outright lie. It MIGHT be right, but you do not know that and can not know that (well if you worked for Wotc and had access to their info you could, but that seams doubtful).

For someone so disillusioned with inference, you seem to have no problem stepping in it every time you try to make a point.

Lie. Defn: a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth.

You do not have sufficient data to prove intent. The lying complaint MIGHT be right, but you do not know that and can not know that (well, if you were them and had access to their mental state you could, but that seams [sic] doubtful). The best you can claim, by your own standards of proof, is that people are simply wrong.

I was giving the benefit of the doubt, that the person making the claim was intelligent enough to know how to reason.

very well, anyone making that claim is either a lier, willfully ignorant (most 3e fans who claim this) or simly not rational/inteigent enough to know the difference between having enough data to form a conclusion and having so little you might as well have none at all.

I want to know why this guy is so hung up on the DDI data? What possible numbers are large enough for DDI to put forth that would demonstrate that [whine] 4e was totally a big success, guys, [/whine] but that are still small enough that the behavior of WotC is still rational or, at least, understandable?

I'm not convinced that those numbers are even possible, which makes the presence or absence of DDI data irrelevant.

Besides, what would DDI data even reasonably show? Beyond that a bunch of disappointed fanboys forgot to cancel their overpriced monthly subscription?

if we had the DDI data for the time when 4e was putting out new stuff that 4e fans had a reason to buy (from when the first PHB came out to just essentials) as well as pathfinder data for the same time period we could accurately judge relative popularity via income for that time period.

without that you can't, you have a fraction of the data, the only data we could trust is from the court doc's, and that is only part of 4e's data we have NONE for pathfinder we can trust.

I said that we do not have enough data to know how popular 4e was, and we do not. we do not have DDI sales so we can not know how much money it made, we do not have the pathfinder data we would need to compare them.

We do not have the data for whether 4E was less popular than Harry Potter or WoW?

Do the court records are not reliable data points for knowing that ALL of 4E's books totaled less that one million over the span of its first year? First-hand account from Ryan D, a marketing guy with direct access to WotC's records, is not trustworthy when he says the 3E PHB sold 300k books in the first 30 days, and they continued to make more print runs for years after?

The data he had access too would be trustworthy, that does not make him trustworthy, unless you have some evidence to show that would indicate he is.

Just because you are incapable of processing data that is not spoon-fed to you doesn't mean other people can't put two and two together and get fucking four. Get your head out of Mike Mearl's ass and think about what you are saying. Your argument is seriously that it is more likely that WotC covered 4E's resounding success by firing the Line Director every fucking year and canning the entire edition (printing nothing for years over printing more shovelware) than it is that 4E tanked so hard that someone's bullshit 3.5 houserules could become the best-selling RPG on the market?

I think its much more likly that 4e did very well, just not so well as to completely dominate the market like the higher ups wanted because they were looking at the past, and failed to see that completely dominated the market was not possible anymore. so rather then admit that they flailed around by firing people and making essentials, cutting years off the 4e line in an attempt to get people to play it who like 2e and 3e.

but of course I could be wrong, neither of us has enough data to know if we are right.

we are both seeing 2+?, I am saying that we can not know the answer, you are saying it must be 4, because your friend's roommate totally saw a 2 there, and we should take your word that his word is good.

What propaganda are you talking about?

I should have been more clear. Please provide a link to your data.

Anything Wotc or anyone who works for them says that has not been verified by a trusted third party is propaganda. Same with any other company unless they are admitting to something so heinous that nothing could be worse for them then what they said.

So your argument is that all of WotC's statements in court attesting to the tiny amounts of 4E product they sold, the fact that they fired the Line Director of 4E every year, and the fact that WotC doesn't mention 4E ever when talking about past successes is propaganda. What the flying monkey fuck? Do you not understand the purpose of propaganda? You don't make propaganda to make yourself look like total fuckups. That doesn't even make fucking sense.

Newsflash moron: mismanaging the single largest name in an entire industry so badly that someone's bullshit knock-off of your last product overtakes your shiny new product in market share is a fucking travesty. There's your "heinous thing that nothing could be worse for them to do". WotC is a company that makes games. They own the most recognizable, most brandable, most sellable name in the entire fucking tabletop games industry, and they drove it into the fucking ground so badly that they fired the dude in charge every fucking year for the entire duration of the edition, whereupon they cancelled everything in the pipeline and opted to print nothing for two fucking years over printing any of the shit that they had planned.

For fuck's sake, if you want to tell someone that you play TTRPGs, you don't say that, you say you play D&D because people know what D&D is: people sitting around a table, rolling dice and being nerdy. They may have never played D&D. They may have never even seen a D&D rulebook, character sheet, or literally anything that was actually D&D at all, but if you tell them that you play D&D they will picture a bunch of people (ok, guys) sitting around a table rolling dice without you having to describe or explain anything else at all. D&D is pop culture, and it is literally the only fucking TTRPG that is. And sure, while D&D is a drop in the bucket compared to M:tG (which is obviously where the people with actual game design chops at WotC work), money is money and the TTRPG community is so bullshit small and D&D was (at that point) so fucking huge that to fail to capitalize on what was essentially a monopoly is a business catastrophe.

I do not have enough data to know, for the fifth time. My point is that no one here has enough so saying that "4e failed" is at best an outright lie. It MIGHT be right, but you do not know that and can not know that (well if you worked for Wotc and had access to their info you could, but that seams doubtful).

Just because you are incapable of processing data that is not spoon-fed to you doesn't mean other people can't put two and two together and get fucking four. Get your head out of Mike Mearl's ass and think about what you are saying. Your argument is seriously that it is more likely that WotC covered 4E's resounding success by firing the Line Director every fucking year and canning the entire edition (printing nothing for years over printing more shovelware) than it is that 4E tanked so hard that someone's bullshit 3.5 houserules could become the best-selling RPG on the market?

Them firing someone is a fact, them saying why is propaganda because we have no way of knowing if it is true or not.

Where is this data?

the amazon best seller list, anecdotal evidence enough for me to think it did, but no more.

Uhm...wait a minute...you said earlier

I am sorry you are right, by my own logic amazon would not be enough data, I have a feeling it would be a better indicator then online gaming but that is all it is.

To be clear, you have admitted that you are not working with any data (that you consider valid) as to how successful 4E was. DSM, Frank, Kaelik, et al have brought forth court docs that you accept as solid, if incomplete, data.

So you have "how you feel" and/or "what you like to believe".
So since you've called folks here liars for having (by your standards) an incomplete data set, I have to ask...when you said you have "limited data", that was you lying to us, right?

Game On,
fbmf

if they had said "I think 4e failed" that would not be a lie, it would have just been their feelings, they said they KNEW it was a failure.

The most amusing part to me is that Captain Pike only accepts comparisons to games published during the run of 4e. Because the release of 4e drove out 'buyers' from the market, 4e only had to sell ~10% of the prior market to have 100% market share - and he defines that as success.

Releasing a product so universally panned that people stop buying the product completely is sort of the opposite of that.

Anecdotally, I still play RPGs, but I haven't bought anything 'new' since halfway through 'Second Darkness'. Pike thinks that me choosing to keep playing with derived 3.x materials proves the success of 4th edition .

Crazy.

if you could prove that 4e not only drove people out, but that if 4e had kept all the cows they would have stayed then yes could include them in the lost collum but without that there is no way to know.

and of course there could as easily be a large number of people who would have left if 4e HAD been 3.75, I certainly know a few.

without some numbers to go off of there is no way to even take a good guess.

[fbmf]

You didn't answer my question.

Game On,
fbmf

[CaptPike]

You didn't answer my question.

Game On,
fbmf

to answer your question again, you are a liar if you claim to have information you do not have by saying something like "4e failed" because you DO NOT AND CAN NOT have enough information to know that.

If you say "I think 4e failed" that means you have limited information, and that information points to 4e failed. That would not be a lie and I can see the reasons you would say that.

If you say "I feel 4e failed" that is just your personal feelings, and really means nothing and needs no support.

[karpik777]

It is very possible, but 60% or so is not good enough for me personally.

Seeing how 60% is often good enough for a court verdict, don't you think this is somewhat absurd?

Also, if you'd go home and find your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/husband/whoever you'd have in bed with your best friend, both of them naked (but not doing anything the moment you enter), would you accuse them of cheating on you? After all, in such a scenario you never saw anything happen, nor do you have any data proving anything did happen...

[CaptPike]

It is very possible, but 60% or so is not good enough for me personally.

Seeing how 60% is often good enough for a court verdict, don't you think this is somewhat absurd?

Also, if you'd go home and find your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/husband/whoever you'd have in bed with your best friend, both of them naked (but not doing anything the moment you enter), would you accuse them of cheating on you? After all, in such a scenario you never saw anything happen, nor do you have any data proving anything did happen...

were that to happen I would have more then 60% confidence, short of someone making the world's biggest bluff check. I do not require 100% but in the least I would like to know what I am missing.

If I have to make a decision with only 60% confidence I will, but even then if I was asked if I was sure I made the right one I would not claim that I knew, because that would be a lie.

That is why words like "think" exist, so I can differentiate the things I know to be true and those that I only think to be true.

[Kaelik]

You didn't answer my question.

Game On,
fbmf

to answer your question again, you are a liar if you claim to have information you do not have by saying something like "4e failed" because you DO NOT AND CAN NOT have enough information to know that.

If you say "I think 4e failed" that means you have limited information, and that information points to 4e failed. That would not be a lie and I can see the reasons you would say that.

If you say "I feel 4e failed" that is just your personal feelings, and really means nothing and needs no support.

I don't know what is more horrifying. That you think those two sentences both make sense in the same universe, or that you think you are answering his question.

[CaptPike]

You didn't answer my question.

Game On,
fbmf

to answer your question again, you are a liar if you claim to have information you do not have by saying something like "4e failed" because you DO NOT AND CAN NOT have enough information to know that.

If you say "I think 4e failed" that means you have limited information, and that information points to 4e failed. That would not be a lie and I can see the reasons you would say that.

If you say "I feel 4e failed" that is just your personal feelings, and really means nothing and needs no support.

I don't know what is more horrifying. That you think those two sentences both make sense in the same universe, or that you think you are answering his question.

Am I missing something? he asked me how I could call someone a liar for saying that 4e failed, while I said I thought if succeeded, while both me and the other party both had the same data?

because I answered that by saying that claming to KNOW something that you do not know is a lie. Saying I think or believe something to be true, even though I do not KNOW it to be true is not.

[Previn]

I want to know why this guy is so hung up on the DDI data? What possible numbers are large enough for DDI to put forth that would demonstrate that [whine] 4e was totally a big success, guys, [/whine] but that are still small enough that the behavior of WotC is still rational or, at least, understandable?

I'm not convinced that those numbers are even possible, which makes the presence or absence of DDI data irrelevant.

Besides, what would DDI data even reasonably show? Beyond that a bunch of disappointed fanboys forgot to cancel their overpriced monthly subscription?

It doesn't matter. nothing about DDI and he money it brought in was actually tied to 4e. They could do DDI for 5e, or whip one up for 3e. DDI just happened to coincide with 4e.

[Previn]

you are a liar if you claim to have information you do not have by saying something like "4e failed" because you DO NOT AND CAN NOT have enough information to know that.

If you say "I think 4e failed" that means you have limited information, and that information points to 4e failed. That would not be a lie and I can see the reasons you would say that.

If you say "I feel 4e failed" that is just your personal feelings, and really means nothing and needs no support.

you are a liar if you claim to have information you do not have by saying something like "4e succeeded" because you DO NOT AND CAN NOT have enough information to know that.

If you say "I think 4e succeeded" that means you have limited information, and that information points to 4e succeeded. That would not be a lie and I can see the reasons you would say that.

If you say "I feel 4e succeeded" that is just your personal feelings, and really means nothing and needs no support.

[Shady314]

60% or so is not good enough for me personally.

Does anything more really need to be said? CaptPike went from funny to really funny and has plowed straight into tedious. The joke has gotten old. Time to use this awesome ignore function.